Jonah 3:1-10
January 23, 2000
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco.
Jonah and the Whale
For most of us here, when we hear the name Jonah we think about how he was swallowed up by a whale. And as a little boy growing up in Boston, I was confused whether Disney’s Pinocchio swallowed up by Monstro, was the same story. Now I know it’s not.
This is a great story! The city of Nineveh was to the northeast of Israel. Tarshish was rumored to be very far away, like as far as present-day Spain.
So here God comes to Jonah saying, “Go over to Nineveh and preach.” Instead, Jonah buys a one way ticket and hops on a ship going the opposite direction, getting as much water between him and Nineveh as possible. There was no pious, “Here, I am Lord, send me.” from Jonah. No, he hightailed it out of town toward Tarshish.
Whether too frightened or too full of himself to prophesy to the Nin-e-vites, Jonah falls asleep below deck, oblivious to the terrible storm above. When the crew fearing for their lives realized that it was Jonah who was causing the rough seas, Jonah volunteered to throw himself overboard.
Deep in the sea, Jonah is swallowed up by a great fish. With time in the fish to think, Jonah repents of his running away from God’s call. After praying the fish miraculously regurgitates Jonah on dry land where he first started to run away from God. With a second chance, God sends Jonah to Nineveh to preach.
Although this time Jonah responds to God’s call, he still does it reluctantly, only half-heartedly. Why, given Jonah’s profession as a prophet that he didn’t want to prophesy? Isn’t it the prophet’s job to bring a message from God to the people?
First of all, Nineveh, the capital of Assyria was Public Enemy #1 of the Israelites. These were horrible people. They had nasty habits. Since they were Israel’s longtime enemy, then they are God’s enemy too. Jonah probably would have gladly gone to preach to the Ninevites if the message was hellfire and damnation. He could have done that. After all, the Assyrians had humiliated and crushed the Israelites, then stripped them of their culture, and their land. Surely God would never forgive them! Surely God could not love them! They had terrorized God’s precious chosen people.
But a second reason why Jonah didn’t want to preach to the Ninevites was that he was afraid it might work. He was afraid that his Public Enemy #1 might listen and repent and God would forgive them. With us as the good guys and those violent, sinful Ninevites as the bad guys, well, you know where you stand. But if they should repent, then we can’t tell what’s up or down, who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. We can’t have that!
God comes to Jonah again, saying, “Let’s go over this one more time in one syllable words, “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.”
All worn out from being in the belly of a great fish, Jonah begrudgingly does what God commands him to do. He goes to the edge of town and delivers his one-sentence, four words in Hebrew, sermon. Unlike me with my interesting illustrations, catchy titles, and personal stories, Jonah only says, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”
The response to the world’s shortest and worst sermon is the greatest in the entire Bible. The people of Nineveh, a city stretching over 60 miles wide, all repented. They started fasting, they all put on sackcloth from the oldest to the youngest, they rolled in ashes. Even the king, who must have heard the sermon second-hand, led the repentance. Even the cattle repented! Dogs, cats, kings, everybody repented!
What about Jonah? He could have said, “Well, I knew I was pretty good in what I do if I say so myself!” No, Jonah gets mad, gets depressed, and says he wishes he were dead.
He said, “I knew this would happen. Isn’t this what I said would happen before I hightailed to Tarshish? God, I know you are a God who is merciful, forgiving, a lover of losers like those Ninevites. I just knew it!”
We and They
Jonah was really angry at God because God forgave and saved Israel’s Public Enemy #1, the Ninevites. While Jonah may have known all along that God is gracious, merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, he still felt that all that love and all that forgiveness belong to the Israelites, not the Ninevites!
How dare God change his mind and not destroy Nineveh! How dare God forgive Israel’s Public Enemy #1! How dare God love people that Jonah hated!
You see, Jonah is the kind of guy who secretly smiles when the star football quarterback shows up at the 25th high school reunion 75 pounds heavier and looking bald. Jonah is the kind of guy who takes pleasure when a colleague who got a big promotion last year gets fired because he thought he should have gotten the promotion in the first place. Jonah is the kind of guy who cheers when a speeder passes him on the freeway and then gets pull over by the California highway patrol for a traffic violation.
Jonah reminds us that even in the community of faith, we confuse what we hate with what God hates. Do we, like Jonah, find pleasure in hating? Do we find joy in our enemy’s misfortune? When we look at the world and see that there’s so much hate in daily-breaking news—hate crimes, hate groups, hate Web sites, kids hating other kids or their parents to the point of shootings like Columbine High School, do we see ourselves as innocent bystanders? We might say, “Those people are sick! They are nothing like us!”
Jonah, a respectable Israelite, provides us with a mirror for ourselves to see—that hate also takes shape in souls that appear to be respectable and faithful. Souls like ours.
Jonah’s going to Nineveh to preach is somewhat like the time when Billy Graham went to the Soviet Union. Some people had only negative reactions to his trip. “What’s a good man like Billy Graham spending time with bad folks like the Soviets? The Soviets can never be Christians. They are the evil forces in the world.”
During World War II, German soldiers marched into battle bearing on their sleeves the motto, “God with us.” We, on the other hand, have been a people who added to our Pledge of Allegiance, “One nation under God.” Is there much difference between our enemies during World War II and us? Do we share the same one God?
An U.S. pilot in the Vietnam War told about his experience, bearing down on a Vietnamese village to drop his bombs. While pushing through the clouds, he caught a glimpse of a church. He said,
“It must have been Sunday because I could see a crowd of people entering
the church in the village. It was only a glimpse, but I could see it clearly.
They were Christians. Nobody ever told me that there were Christians in Viet Nam. It could have been my hometown, my Catholic church. They looked
just like us. They worshipped the same way we worshipped. Nobody told me.”
We unmercifully bisect the world into good guys/bad guys in denial that there is one God. Three thousand years after Israel met one God, we still find it tough to believe in one God. We have our God, the Ninevites have theirs. Our polytheism—believing that there are many gods, leads us to deadly tribalism. We are surprised to find our God working on the other side of the street. We divide up the world among rival dieties and we end up being feuding subjects.
One God for All
Jesus tried to teach us. He told a story that we love. It’s about the father’s waiting for the return of the prodigal son. We take great delight that the father waits upon, receives, and restores the wayward younger brother. But I remind you how that story ends, not with the father inside the house, partying with the once wayward but now penitent younger son. The story ends with the father standing outside in the dark, earnestly pleading with the older brother to come in. God loves both the wayward younger brother and the stay-at-home resentful older brother. The story ends not knowing whether the older brother will ever come in or not. It’s unfinished for us to finish.
Because God was among the Ninevites, we can take heart knowing that because God is their God, God can be our God too. When Jesus invited Judas to the table, therefore we too are invited to be at the table with Jesus.
One of the biggest films a few years ago was Independence Day, a medium budget, high-tech, bad-space-guys-come-to-get-us-but-we-get-them epic that drew huge crowds. Isn’t it fascinating that this film was so popular? With the Russians in rags and no longer a fitting enemy for the United States, we cast around another enemy, another bad guy to organize us to resist. Now, without the Soviets, our enemies are cosmic aliens coming to harm us on Independence Day.
This past week you may have noticed that the Pentagon tested their missile defense system to protect the United States. The test launched a modified Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It carried a mock warhead and balloon decoy. After twenty minutes later a prototype intercepter was launched from the Marshall Islands, some 4300 miles west of the California coast. The kill vehicle hurtled toward the missile but failed to hit it. In the wake of heightened suspicion toward Asians, the papers said, “This “star wars’ defense shield is meant to protect all 50 states from a limited strike by an unpredictable enemy, like North Korea and China.”
It is almost like our country can’t exist without enemies. Don’t we have a national identity to bring us together except mutual hatred of some enemy?
When Jonah became angry at God for forgiving the Ninevites from their calamity, Jonah went out of the city to sulk. God saw that he was hot under the sun, so he made a bush to give Jonah some shade. But by the next morning, the bush died from a worm and Jonah wanted to die again. But the Lord said to Jonah,
“You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which
you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night.”
God was teaching Jonah that if he wanted to make the bush green and provides shade, that God’s business to do it. And if God wants to let the bush die, that’s God’s business too! If God wants to save the Ninevites, God can do that because it is God’s business!
The last sentence in the Book of Jonah is a question asked by God,
“And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which
there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not
know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”
Like the story of the waiting Father who now waits to see if his older son would come inside and join the party, the story of Jonah ends with a question from God too. Will we give God the chance to do God’s work as the one and only God in the world? Are we able to recognize that our God may be their God too?
Christmas in the Trenches
Let me close with sharing this familiar true story called, “Christmas in the Trenches.” I think it’s worth hearing again.
On Christmas Eve in 1914, the first year of World War I, a strange quiet had settled on the western front. It was a welcome respite for a group of lonely English soldiers who had become all too familiar with the roar of the cannons and the whine of the rifles.
As they reclined in their trenches each man began to speculate about the activities of loved ones back home. “My parents are just finishing a toast to my health,” a lad from Liverpool said slowly.
“I can also hear the church bells,” a stout man from Ely said wistfully. “My whole family will soon be walking out the door to hear the concert of the boy’s choir at the cathedral.”
The men sat silent for several minutes before a thin soldier from Kent looked up with tears in his eyes. “This is eerie.” he stammered, “but I can almost hear the choir singing.”
“So can I,” shouted another puzzled voice. “I think there is music coming from the other side.”
All the men scrambled to the edge of the trench and cocked their ears. What they heard was a few sturdy German voices singing Martin Luther’s Christmas song, “From heav’n above to earth I come, to bear good news to every one. Glad tidings of great joy I bring to all the world, and gladly sing.”
When the hymn was finished, the English soldiers sat frozen in silence. Then a large man with a powerful voice broke into the chorus of “God rest ye merry gentlemen.” By the time he finished the entire regiment was singing.
Once again there was an interlude of silence until a German tenor began to sing “Silent Night.” This time the song was sung in two languages, a chorus of nearly a hundred voices echoing back and forth between the trenches, “Silent night, holy night! All is calm, all is bright…”
“Someone is approaching!” a sentry shouted, and attention was focused on a single German soldier who walked slowly, waving a white cloth with one hand and holding several bars of chocolate in the other. Slowly, men from both sides eased out into the neutral zone and began to greet one another. In the next golden moments each soldier shared what he had with the others, candy, cigarettes and even a bit of Christmas brandy. Most important the soldiers showed the battered, but treasured pictures they carried of loved ones.
No one knows whose idea it was to start the football match, but with the help of flares the field was lit and the British and German soldiers played until they and the lights were exhausted. Then, quietly as they came together, the men returned to their own trenches.
On Christmas day, men from both sides joined together, even visiting the other’s trenches. The German soldiers, wishing to avenge the previous night’s torch-lit football loss, organized another game of what Americans call soccer.
In a few days the cannons once gain boomed across “no man’s land” and the whine of rifles was again heard in the trenches. For some, however, it was never the
same. The enemy was no longer faceless. Now he was an acquaintance who shared a candy bar or played soccer. When men looked down the barrels of their guns at the opposition they also saw the smiling faces of those whose pictures were shared on a silent, holy night when the birth of Christ drew hostile forces together as brothers and, for a few moments, gave weary soldiers a taste of peace and good will.
Let us in the name of Christ, put away this need to divide up our world between the good guys and the bad guys, enemies and friends. Let us learn the lesson that Jonah seemed to have such a hard time learning—that the God of the Israelites is the same God of the Ninevites. God yearns to have the whole world, and in great mercy, shall have the whole world, despite our cherished divisions.
If God manages to care even for the Ninevites, to find a place in his merciful heart even for them, then we can also cling to the expansive mercy of God as well!
Let us pray.
Precious Lord God, we ask for your forgiveness when we hate our brothers and sisters. The whole world is yours and you are the one God to all of us. Make us your instruments of peace and love in the world. Amen.